GEORGE COMER: UNDER THE VOLCANO
By Peter Frank
Since the 1950s, many artists have attempted to recapitulate the essence
of abstract expressionism; only a few have succeeded. The postwar conditions
that prompted painters chiefly in the United States, parts of Europe,
and Japan to turn inward and manifest passion through the abstract agitation
of pigment have been difficult to duplicate since. It could be argued
that military, ethnic, and ecological strife around the globe has returned
us to the cold war-doomsday fears of a half-century ago, and that the
re-emergence of an intensely felt gestural abstraction is inevitable
in this context; but so is the re-emergence of several models of art
making, driven by ideals and anxieties appropriate to our time. A new
abstract expressionism does not dominate these choices.
For George Comer, however, abstract expressionism has presented itself
as ripe for re-examination – especially as a context for considering
both meaning and method. Comer’s own technique yields a kind of
painting that would have been readily recognized fifty years ago (although,
of course, he is able to achieve particular effects with media unavailable
to the original abstract expressionist painters). It also would have
been admired by the color-field painters a decade or so later as they
evolved away from their emphasis on staining unblended colors and towards
a more visually complex exploration of painterly process. Similarly,
the ooze and spew of Comer’s earthen-hued paints would have been
appreciated by the Gutai painters in Osaka as they forged a late-modernist
path for Japanese art that conflated atomic-age anguish with the traditional
unease of a people living on a volcanic archipelago. The ferocious turbulence,
rough textures, and expansive sense of compositional space that characterize
even Comer’s smallest paintings clearly renew the anxieties of
the “age of anxiety” (as Auden termed the postwar years).
But Comer is prompted not by a desire to revive Gutai or abstract expressionism
or color-field painting or (for that matter) European tachisme, but
to apply the techniques and appearances of those mid-century romantics
to the sensibilities of the present day. For one thing, Comer, like
so many of his peers, now rejects the spiritual dissipation and mannered
discourse of late post-modernism, and seeks meaning and relevance in
modernist – in Comer’s case, late-modernist – tropes.
For another, he seeks to determine a distinctive voice for himself not
by trying to do what hasn’t been done, but by feeling what needs
to be felt, and trusting that his response would be honest enough to
himself to generate a body of work quite evidently particular to his
vision.
For several years Comer explored various formal languages and technical
means in his conscious evolution away from the ceramic work he had been
doing until 2002. In seeking the same sort of physically articulated
surface as he had achieved in his fired-clay work – what he called
“sculptural scarring” – he emphasized process and
material and engaged such unorthodox “painting” material
as latex, cement, sand, and even coffee grounds (hence the label given
his earlier painting, “abstract expressionism”). After attempting
to formulate symbol-laden imagery with such means, Comer came to realize
that the substances themselves could dictate not just their own textures,
but their own forms, and that in manipulating them he could collaborate
with them towards an expressive end. Seeking to manifest a continuum
with nature in his work, Comer came to allow nature its course, and
found his form where his own need to make marks met nature’s need
to let materials flow and pool, coagulate and coruscate.
In this, Comer has distanced himself from the existential struggle that
drove abstract expressionism itself. While his fluid painting renews
the eruptive fervor of abstract expressionist method and its restless
questing for a higher, greater truth, the violence that manifests in
Comer’s art is not the violence of his soul but the violence of
the earth, the violence that finally dwarfs humankind’s own, the
violence that is in fact nature’s way of renewing itself outside
the course of its own cycles – the violence of rebirth. The destructive
force reflected in Comer’s art is actually the phoenix rising
from the fire – the constructive destructive force represented
in the Hindu religion by the god Shiva. As it now stands, George Comer’s
painting is driven by a fury far greater than his or anyone’s
or everyone’s; it is driven by the fury of everything.
Los Angeles
April 2008